Gen X [meme]: Slackers, Sellouts or Saviors

On September 28, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

Generation X

Generation X

Maddie Grant from SocialFish has started I meme asking if GenX has sold out. I can’t help but jump in here. Being a proud Gen Xer I’ve said a few things about my generation and our contribution to society.

Every generation resents the status quo. Every teenager has angst so lets set that aside.

My first thought is that despite the general rage and discontent we were and still are largely apathetic (hence the slacker tag). We all make trade-offs as we “settle down” if we don’t we usually end up being homeless or in jail. But as I said in the comment on her Maddie’s blog:

I love this topic. There’s a great HBR case study called The Next 20 Years, I highly recommend it (you can get it as an audio book on iTunes and it’s not very long). In it they talk about the different archetypes (there’s 4) and cycles that each generation follows.

Boomers are selfish (they said it – but yes I agree with it) and Xers are more pragmatic. Boomers sold their collective hippie souls for corporate jobs with fat paycheck doing things they didn’t like. Xers as a whole don’t take jobs just for the money (we do like money though). If we don’t like something we have no problem walking out the door and making our own way, with our own rules.

Despite being half as small as either the Boomers or GenY, we are the single most entrepreneurial generation EVER!

We may not rage against the machine anymore but that’s only because we are finally empowered to fix things and do what we see as right. We don’t have to take “the man’s” shit anymore.

Yes we may take “jobs” and “play nice” but, collectively, we were never anti-capitalism. We just didn’t like being told what to do. Now we don’t have to and, yes, it takes some of the edge off that rage. But just try telling us we can’t do something.

In all fairness every generation makes a huge impact both for better and for worse.  I admit to still having some angst at the way my parents generation did things, and I tend to remember much of the negative but we wouldn’t have been able to do the things we have done if they hadn’t done the things they had done.

History will judge us and it will be interesting to see how we’re portrayed. I hope our entrepreneurialism is remembered but more than anything else I hope that like the Baby Boomers and their parents and their parent we serve as an example to lead the Gen Y and my children and their children to bigger and better than things than we could have done.

Now to keep the meme alive I tag:
Justin Foster
Steve Nipper
Michael Brito
Jeremy Meyers
And my beautiful wife Jen.

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Why is Gen X so Entrepreneurial? Dysfunction.

On September 23, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
Paper People
Image by Tac Anderson via Flickr

I’m a proud member of the vastly outnumbered Generation X. We grew up being called The Slacker Generation (ironically by a bunch of washed up hippies who sold their soles). While the Baby Boomers and Generation Y both are about twice as big as Gen X, we have become the most entrepreneurial generation ever.

We posses amazing resourcefulness, tenacity and don’t take no for an answer. VentureBeat ran a guest post by Steve Blank that may give us a hint. Gen Xers were the original latch key kids. We saw divorce go from a taboo topic to almost something that was expected or fashionable.

Our generation put the F U in dysfunction.

Some have turned that into resourcefulness and created great things. Life isn’t about what happens to you, it’s about what you do next.

Do dysfunctional families breed entrepreneurs? | VentureBeat

Over the last five years I’ve asked over 500 of my students how many of them grew up in a dysfunctional family (participation was voluntary.) I’ve been surprised at the data. In this admittedly very unscientific survey I’ve found that between a quarter and half of the students I consider “hard-core” entrepreneurs/founders (working passionately to found a company,) self-identified as coming from a less than benign upbringing.

Founders as Survivors
My hypothesis is that most children are emotionally damaged by this upbringing. But a small percentage, whose brain chemistry and wiring is set for resilience, come out of this with a compulsive, relentless and tenacious drive to succeed. They have learned to function in a permanent state of chaos. And they have channeled all this into whatever activity they could find outside of their home – sports, business, or …entrepreneurship.

Therefore, I’ll posit one possible path for a startup founder – the dysfunctional family theory.

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The 2009 Recession Will Produce the Largest Wave of Entrepreneurship

On March 14, 2009, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

This isn’t a recession, it’s a Revolution!

I am proud to say that my generation; Generation X has been the largest entrepreneurial generation ever. That’s all about to change.  In preparing for my IgniteBoise presentation my friend Steve Nipper sent this great NYT article over to me:

Tired of Looking for Work, Some Create Their Own – NYTimes.com

“If there is a silver lining, the large-scale downsizing from major companies will release a lot of new entrepreneurial talent and ideas — scientists, engineers, business folks now looking to do other things,” Mr. Cannice said. “It’s a Darwinian unleashing of talent into the entrepreneurial ecosystem.”

The tidal wave of workforce being unleashed on the open market consist of just as many, if not more, Baby Boomers as Gen Xers and as Generation Y walks out of college they are also being hit with the stark reality that there are no jobs.

I predict that the rising force of new businesses will be the most disruptive movement to date.

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The Myth of the Corporation.

On December 11, 2008, In The Book, By Tac Anderson
Sears Tower from the John Hancock Center Obser...

There was a time, supposedly, when large companies  resided in one building. When you worked your way *up* the company ladder, you literally moved up in the building. The higher you went the higher the paycheck, until you reached the top.

Information traveled in the company the same way. Information came into the company at the bottom levels, usually in the form of mail, telephone calls or information in people’s heads.

That information was turned into reports and memo’s and sent up a level. From there I imagine that someone took a series of reports and condensed those into another report for another level of management and sent it up. When the reports reached a high enough level orders were passed down the ladder again, getting broken up into smaller and smaller actionable items.

Being old enough to remember my mother typing reports up in triplicate on carbon paper and sending inter-office memo’s, I can’t imagine how long it took to get work done.

Now of course I think most of this was theoretical. It’s the version of Corporate America we still see portrayed on TV and in movies, but I doubt it ever functioned this precisely. There are obviously a million opportunities for error and deviation in this model. I’m sure this is why IT was seen as the second coming of the messiah in the eyes of CEO’s everywhere. And those who didn’t bow in humility were wiped from the face of the earth.

People, and knowledge, stayed inside the company. You learned your job from your boss and you got promoted when he moved up or retired. People rarely left the company they started with. You were loyal to the company, and in theory, they were loyal to you.

Companies competed with other local or regional companies. In rare instances, companies competed with other companies nationally. To stay on top companies only had to understand their business. Product cycles were long. Innovation was something that happened very slowly. The only global threats facing a company were political in nature. A war was the most disruptive thing that could happen to a company.

In this fairytale Corporate America, companies provided all kinds of community service. One such service was that they paid for our radio and television. They also provided valuable bit of information about the most wonderful things we’d like to know about and they conveniently placed these treasures of information in the shows we were all already watching as commercials.

People trusted the Government.
People trusted Corporate America.
People trusted the Media.

The Media was the most trusted organization in America. The News was the most trusted source of information. Media defined us (some argue that it still does). Media unified us (some argue that is does the opposite now). Media validated everything that we believed about our fairytale lives and what we believed about the rest of the world.

Like all fairytales this one also be turned out to be not true.

This is the fairytale I was told growing up. In order to be granted admittance to this mythical land all you needed to do was do well in school, go to college and when you graduated you would be able to choose from all the awaiting jobs.

That obviously isn’t the world that me and my Gen X brothers and sisters woke up to. Someone changed the rules and didn’t bother telling us what the new rules were. So we made up our own. I think this is why Gen X has been the most entrepreneurial generation to ever walk the face of the earth, and we’re only in our 30’s and 40’s.

In my next post I’ll contrast this fairytale world to the one we live and work in today. Have any thoughts (of course you do)?

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New Media Trifecta (part 1)

On April 3, 2007, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

There is a “perfect storm” coming to American businesses.

Trust – People’s trust is at an all time low (and for very good reason). This doesn’t just effect customer relationships, but also employee, partner and stakeholder relationships. Do your customers trust you? Do your employees trust you? Do you care? (If the answer is no please stop reading and just go away.)

Retention -

- People – Unemployment is at an all time low: 4.4% nationally, as of this writing. Add to that that in less than 5 years Baby Boomers are going to start retiring at the rate of 1,000 a day and there are not enough Gen Xers to take their place. Add to that that Gen X has been career hoping all their lives and shows no sign of stopping.

– Knowledge – What is going to happen to your IP as Baby Boomers exodus the work place for greener pastures? How do you keep all those ideas the creative Gen Xers bring to a work place if they are continually career hopping. How do you pass that knowledge off to Gen Y and ensure that it sticks? In order to fill some key positions companies will have to start outsourcing more or allowing for remote/telecommuting employees.

Innovation – It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, competition is so fierce that companies must innovate to survive. Yet it is difficult to allocate the resources to innovation when companies are constantly forced to do more with less. How can you dedicate a team of people to one product that may or may not pay off? How can you assign employees to another project that will require MORE MEETINGS?

How Are American Companies Supposed to Stay Competitive?

I believe that New Media offers a powerful solution to this problem.

This is part one of a very long post. I realized that it was getting too long so I decided to post this first part. I’m still working on the second part and doing a little research on it. If you have any feedback or suggestions or tyrades, please launch them here.

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Follow-Up on WGI’s Internal Blogging

On March 26, 2007, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

It was almost one year ago that Shel Israel met with Andy Snodgrass to talk about internal blogging at WGI.

I had the opportunity to meet Andy and I had to ask him if anything had become of his interest in internal blogging. I was disappointed but not at all surprised to hear that nothing at all had come of it. It seemed apparent from his response that the idea was not even on the table anymore.

WGI like most companies in America are faced with an uncertain future. There is going to be a huge loss in resources and knowledge as Baby Boomers leave the workplace. There just are not as many Gen Xers (about half) to fill the vacancy’s that are coming and Gen Y is mostly too green to take on higher management role.

Andy admitted that social networking tools would be a perfect fit to solve their problems. He also brought up one of the best arguments as to why they dropped the idea: Baby Boomers won’t use the tools. Now my first gut reaction was: there are Baby Boomers who blog, followed by, if you implemented the tools, provided training and instituted a policy…. Then reality set in, yeah they wouldn’t use it. Most Baby Boomers are not going to use any type of social networking tool.

WGI has a good plan in place: As their engineers move into retirement, hire them back part time and team them up with someone they can mentor. A good majority of these Type A engineers would love an opportunity like this.

Then I thought a little more seriously about their problem. How do they pass on all of that valuable information from their aging engineers to the younger, just out of school engineers? One on one is great and invaluable, but how much information can be passed on and retained this way. WGI’s plan won’t work for each new hire. Even if they could get a one to one match up across the company you have personality differences and generational dynamics that won’t work in all cases. Plus how long will Baby Boomers really want to work or be able to?

Gen Y and a certain percentage of Gen X would willingly use new media tools. Combine those tools with the steps that WGI is already implementing and you have a real Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Management solution. As the younger engineers learn from their mentors they can record and share that information with their peers. Blogs, podcasts, wikis, tagging, RSS feeds and all things geeky could make information sharing across the entire company infinitely more powerful than any currently available enterprise solution.

Obviously no solution is utopian, and there would still be many more hurdles to implementing a solution like this but it seems better than anything else I’ve heard of. Does anyone know of a company using new media for this type of solution? Can someone think of a better solution?

Additional Resources:
All Kind Food
Andrew McAfee

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